The Red Sea: “Gendercide Undone: Evaluating the Causes of South Korea’s Return to Normal Sex Ratios” by Nicole Christine Frazer

Thursday, September 13, 2012

SUMMARY

After studying the problem of gendercide in China, I decided to examine another nation—South Korea—that struggled with gendercide in the 80s and 90s but somehow managed to bring its sex ratio within normal ratios during the past decade. My submission is the fruit of that examination—in the form of an extensive piece of original research. I focus a large portion of the paper on outlining six primary theories on what elements played the most important roles in ending Korea’s gender imbalance; later, I weigh the validity of these theories. To my knowledge, there is no other piece of research as extensive as this one that examines the plausibility of the different theories as to how South Korea fixed its gendercide problem. I hope that this piece can be used by both laypeople and policymakers to help end gendercide in China and throughout the world because it examines different aspects of South Korea’s transformation and discusses whether or not facets of South Korea’s transition can be exported to other nations.

I wrote this piece because I find South Korea’s story both confounding and inspiring. Confounding because the myriad forces that drove Korea’s resolution of gendercide are difficult—and sometimes impossible—to nail down. Inspiring because Korea is the only nation in modern times that has reversed rampant gendercide. And ultimately, for me, this piece represents hope: hope for the unwanted women and girls of Eastern Europe, India, and China—and anywhere else that gendercide is rampant. As I write in the paper, this piece holds deep meaning for me because Korea’s history of gendercide is a tragic and muddled one—yet, its experience is ringed about with hope.

BIO

A graduate of Patrick Henry College with a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations, Nicole is currently a law student at the University of Virginia. While an undergraduate, she founded the college chapter of All Girls Allowed at Patrick Henry College and sat on the national student board for AGA. Her professional experience includes working for Prison Fellowship Ministries, the Heritage Foundation, and United States Senator Richard Lugar. Currently, Nicole is pursuing her degree in law at the University of Virginia; she one day hopes to use her legal experience to help abused, battered, and underrepresented women throughout the world obtain legal representation within their own legal systems.

I want to be able to continue to research on the issue of gendercide. I especially want to focus on other countries that have, or had in the the past, abysmal gender ratios, looking at how the experiences of other countries with gendercide can help us understand—and hopefully come closer—to solving China’s problem.

Gendercide Undone: Evaluating the Causes of South Korea’s Return to Normal Sex Ratios

“A woman must follow three men in her lifetime: her father, her husband, and finally her eldest son.” ~ Confucian principle of samjong-jido[1]

“”There are three unfilial acts: the greatest of these is the failure to produce sons.” ~ Confucius[2]

“[To] choose the sexes of our children … is one of the most stupendously sexist acts in which it is possible to engage. It is the original sexist sin … [Both pre- and post- conception technologies] make the most basic judgment about the worth of a human being rest first and foremost on its sex.” ~ Tabitha Powledge[3]

The modern world is facing a demographic and human rights crisis of astronomical proportions: one hundred sixty-million girls are missing from the world today. Throughout much of the world, and especially Eastern Europe and Asia, a decided preference for male babies is held by much of the population. Women and men in many cultures want to have sons—and are using modern technologies, such as sex-selective abortion, to unsure that they do so. In China, over 120 boys are born for every 100 girls, and in India 108 boys are born for every 100 girls. The slaughter of millions of female fetuses has resulted in a host of problems, including increased human trafficking and abysmally high suicide rates among women.

But in the midst of this dismal picture for baby girls throughout the world, one bright light stands out: South Korea. In 1990, South Korea was experiencing a gender imbalance almost as high as China’s today and the highest in the world at the time. Yet as of 2007, South Korea had brought its male-female ratio at birth down to a natural level. But how did South Korea manage this unheard-of feat in such a short period of time? And what implications and hope does South Korea’s experience hold for other nations—such as China and India—that are facing similar gender imbalances? This paper will examine the answers that various authors have given to these questions, ultimately concluding that demographic and reproductive law enforcement theories stand up better than do theories centering on the status of women in Korea. While a cursory look at the various theories might lead one to believe that factors that have elevated the status of women in Korea have done the most to decrease gendercide, this paper ultimately finds that demographic and reproductive law enforcement have played the most important role in ending gendercide in Korea.

Part I of this paper will lay the background for the remainder of the paper; it will flesh out terms and concepts utilized to describe woman-killing, explain normal sex ratios and modern sex ratios throughout the world, and briefly outline the development of modern sex selection technologies. Part II will give a brief history of sex selection and changing sex ratios in South Korea. Part III will outline six primary theories on what elements played the most important part in ending Korea’s gender imbalance. Part IV will form the conclusion of this paper and will briefly discuss the relevance of Korea’s experience to the experiences of other nations facing similar gender imbalances. Ultimately, Korea’s history of gendercide is a tragic and muddled one—yet, its experience is ringed about with hope.

Part I: Background in Terms, Sex Ratios, and Sex-Selection Technologies

The Killing of Women: Terms and Concepts

A plethora of terms and concepts are utilized in the discussion of various actions and crimes that result in gender[4] disparities. When narrowly-defined, femicide means “the misogynist killing of women by men.”[5] More loosely, femicide can be defined as “the killing of females by males because they are females”;[6] in other words, all types of killings propagated by men against women for sexist reasons. In contrast, the term gendercide applies to any killings directed against a particular sex, regardless of whether the perpetrators of the killings were male or female. Mary Anne Warren, who originally coined the term, defined gendercide as “those wrongful forms of sexual discrimination which reduce the relative number of females or males, whether through direct killing or in more indirect ways.”[7] Some authors, however, find gendercide to be a “somewhat misleading and limited term”[8] since it has been used too broadly by some writers to portray every murder as an inherently gendered act. Notably, the term gendercide can apply to sex-based killing of men or women, while femicide includes only the killing of women.

Both femicide and gendercide may be loosely considered to fall under the broader category of genocide, which the United Nations’ 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defined as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:(a) Killing members of the group;(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”[9] Thus, femicide and gendercide are forms of genocide, because both involve the intent to destroy a large group of individuals based exclusively on their “indelible group membership.”[10]

Two key terms are commonly-used to frame the means by which gendercide and femicide are carried out against children at a young age. Infanticide, or the killing of infants, is one method. Infanticide has roots that extend far back into history; R.J. Rummel concludes that “the death toll from infanticide must exceed that from mass sacrifice and perhaps even outright mass murder.”[11] While on an individual basis infanticide can be carried out against any infant, “there are almost no examples of groups engaging in preferential male infanticide as a universal social practice.”[12] Another method of killing is feticide, or the killing of a fetus; in this paper, abortion will be included under the umbrella term of feticide. Both “infanticide and feticide have been used as the means to eliminate unwanted children throughout history; however these practices have been and still are disproportionately applied to females.”[13] In general, as access to abortion and other reproductive technologies increases, feticide seems to be replacing infanticide as the preferred means of sex-selecting children.

In this paper, the term gendercide will be utilized, as it rightly encompasses the fact that sex-preferential policies and actions in South Korea were forwarded and instigated by both men and women. Additionally, although gendercide can be committed against either men or women, this paper will utilize the term exclusively in the context of gendercide against women, and will be narrowly-utilized to apply only to the killing of women and girls inherently because they are female. While this paper will touch on infanticide, it will primarily focus on the feticide directed against females in South Korea. Ultimately, utilizing these basic definitions, this paper will seek to shed light on why South Korea experienced high levels of gendercide, primarily through feticide—and how South Korea managed to end widespread gendercidal practices.

Global Sex Ratios: Gender Balanced and Imbalanced

Across all societies that record births throughout documented history, between 103 and 106 boys are born for every 100 girls;[14] this ratio “appears to be the natural order of things.” This slightly-skewed, natural ratio of male to female births appears to level out later in life due to the fact that mortality rates differ for men and women during different times of their lives. For example,

Males are generally more susceptible to death in the first year of life, with a marked difference in mortality rates during this period, and throughout childhood males continue to have higher mortality rates. In addition to increased vulnerability to genetic disorders, male infants are more susceptible to infectious diseases… . As males and females approach old age, males tend to die younger than females.[15]

Ultimately, “boys outnumber girls at birth because men outnumber women in early deaths.”[16]

As of 2010, most regions in the world fall within the range of 103 to 106 males to every 100 females at birth. Africa’s ratio is 104:100; Europe’s, 106:100; South America’s, 105:100; and North America’s, 105:100.[17] As the population ages, these ratios naturally drop and even reverse themselves due to the fact that men generally have a shorter life expectancy than women. For example, the overall male to female sex ratio of the population in Africa is 100:100; in Europe, 93:100; in South America 97.6:100; and in North America 97.5:100.[18]

However, Asia falls far outside the normal range with 109 females born for every 100 males. This ratio is even more shocking when one compares this ratio with the ratio that some demographers believe should be prevalent throughout Asia; due to their high fertility levels and youthful age structure, Asian populations should exhibit sex ratios of 101 to 103 males born per every 100 females.[19] In Asia, the wide gender disparity at birth is largely due to the abysmal birth ratios in India and China. Both India and China, along with various other countries in Asia, have troubling and unnatural sex ratios at birth; China’s ratio is 120:100, and India’s is 108:100.[20] As China and India account for one-third of the global population, “their lopsided birth totals have already skewed the sex ratio at birth of the entire world, which has risen from 105 to the biologically impossible 107.”[21] Gendercide against women has ultimately led to millions of missing women in the world—the World Health Organization places the number of missing women in China alone at fifty million, while other demographers put the number as high as one hundred million.[22] Overall, there are 160 million missing women in the world due to gendercide.[23]

Sex-Selection Technologies and Population Control

South Korea presents a unique exception to the troubling trend of increasingly large sex-selection ratios in Asia; it “was the first country to report exceptionally high sex ratios and has been the first to cut them.”[24] But before the ratio improved in Korea, the male to female birth rate was abysmal. New reproductive technologies and new mindsets helped to make sex-selective abortion prevalent in Korea, particularly during the 1980s. Yet, many of these new mindsets did not originate in Korea; rather, they were conceived and popularized in the West.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the use of different types of contraceptives was on the rise in the West, and technologies such as the ultrasound were being developed that would eventually enable parents to ascertain the sex of their child in utero. At the same time, a dangerous idea was coming into vogue—an idea that, when united with these new reproductive technologies, would prove to have dramatic affects on demographics worldwide. This idea was population control, and some of its promoters embraced radical solutions to what they believed was an impending demographic and resource crisis. Paul Elrich’s 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, advocated Malthusian ideas and claimed that world population would shortly outpace basic resources and production capabilities on a global level; he urged for radical responses to the purported population crisis. Among his solutions, he “helped popularize the idea that ensuring couples sons was an effective means of curbing population growth.”[25] This idea was quickly exported from the West. Initially, however, the curbing of population growth was not gendercidal, since reproductive technologies were not yet advanced enough to determine the sex of a child before birth. Thus, at this time, sex-preferentiality was exhibited through what became known as the “stopping rule”—the phenomenon that occurred when “couples kept having children until they had a son.”[26] Once they had a son, they would stop having children. This trend was especially prevalent in Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, and was so prevalent that demographers could often determine whether a couple would have another child by knowing the gender of the couple’s last child.[27]

But technologies that determined the gender of a child in utero—such as amniocentesis and superior ultrasound technology—were soon developed and access to them quickly became widespread. In 1976 the United States government approved the use of amniocentesis for second-trimester pregnancies. Amniocentesis involves the extraction of amniotic fluid and the subsequent analysis of fetal material found within the fluid to determine various attributes of the embryo—including its gender. By 1979, amniocentesis “could identify fetal sex to nearly 100 percent accuracy.”[28] A few years later, cheap, mass-produced ultrasounds arrived on the global scene.[29] As the 1970s drew to a close, the scene was set for massive levels of both feticide and female-focused gendercide through sex-selective abortion.[30]

Part II: Sex-Selection and Sex-Ratios in South Korea: A Brief History

The wide sex ratios that occurred in South Korea in the 1980s appeared partially because “the widespread use of sex-selective technology in South Korea preceded that of other Asian countries.”[31] When the Korean War ended in 1953, South Korea experienced a baby boom that helped to make it “the next major crisis zone for population workers.”[32] The groundwork for widespread sex-selective abortion was laid in the early 1960s, as the United States pressured Korea to increase its efforts to stem its population. The International Planned Parenthood Foundation formed the Planned Parenthood Federation of Korea on April 1, 1961, and the Population Council began officially working with the Korean government in 1962.[33]

Western proponents of family planning—both employees of the federal government and workers for NGOS—wielded a large amount of influence over the South Korean government under Park Chung-hee, who ruled South Korea from 1961 to 1979. During the 1960s, Korea allocated twenty-five percent of its health budget to family planning, and 1,500 Korean family planning fieldworkers placed themselves at the disposal of Western advisers.[34] In order to help Korea create a fleet of mobile population control clinics, the U.S. Agency for International Development donated eleven reconditioned U.S. Army Ambulances, fifty Jeeps, and fifty busses and half-ton trucks.[35]

Meanwhile, Korean law and law enforcement were adapting to the new reproductive climate. While sections 269 and 270 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Korea of 1953 prohibited abortion for any reason, with the family planning programs of the early 1960s “abortion became a common practice despite the legal prohibition, mainly because a large number of physicians were willing to perform abortions and the officials were reluctant to enforce the law.”[36] The 1973 Maternal and Child Health Law established exemptions to this prohibition;[37] still, most abortions remained illegal. Yet the non-existent level of enforcement meant that abortion could and would become widespread.

Despite an influx of foreign support for family planning and a changing legal climate, the Korean populace was not initially keen on embracing contraception and abortion. Some women rejected contraception because they wanted to have a son.[38] Additionally, many South Koreans lived in rural areas that were difficult for family planners to reach. Here, the roving population control fleet came into play; small teams traveled the country, performing IUD insertions and sterilizations in the backs of the vehicles. Team members were incentivized to perform as many IUD insertions and sterilizations as possible, as they were paid on a per-procedure basis.[39] While most abortions were illegal, the roving clinics did perform them, often pressuring women to abort and then undergo sterilization. Reports indicate that Korean women did not seek abortion at their own volition, and in some cases were even forced to have abortions or undergo sterilizations.[40]

In the end, mindsets about abortion began to shift; in a 1971 survey “81 per cent of the women reported a strong preference for legalizing abortion.”[41] By 1977, “doctors in Seoul were performing 2.75 abortions for every birth—the highest documented rate of abortion in human history.”[42] Ultimately, the fertility goals of the population planners were met; the number of children born per women dropped from 6.33 between 1955 and 1960 to 4.71 between 1965 and 1970, and continued to drop, falling to 2.92 between 1975 and 1980.[43] At the same time, the disparity between males and females born began to grow. Until 1970, the sex ratio at birth in South Korea was between 105 and 107 boys to every 100 girls; after 1970, it began to slowly climb, hitting a ratio of 108.3:100 in 1980.[44]

In the 1980s, efforts to continue to decrease population growth in South Korea intensified. Korea’s new military ruler, Chun Doo-hwan, realized that population control “had proven a reliable source of foreign aid”[45] and eagerly continued to pursue funding for population control initiatives. The World Bank gave Korea a loan of $30 million that was earmarked for family planning and later transferred millions more to the country through the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.[46] Mobile clinics re-appeared and a new slogan informed Koreans that “Even Two Is A Lot” as Chun implemented a policy similar to China’s one-child policy; he decreased the recommended number of children to one and denied social benefits to women who violated the policy.[47] Ultimately, “the additional pressure the campaign placed on women to restrict their fertility no doubt played a role in South Korea’s 1980s binge of sex selective abortions.”[48]

The long-term effects of two decades of extreme population control and gendercidal sex-selective abortion began to surface during the 1980s and early 1990s. The number of children born per woman continued to plummet, falling to 2.23 between 1980 and 1985 and to 1.60 between 1985 and 1990.[49] The sex ratio continued rise; in 1990 it hit the abysmal number of 116.9 boys born for every 100 girls born[50]—at that point in time the highest sex ratio in the world.[51] The future of women in Korea looked to be increasingly dim, since “there were nearly 25% more males born in 1980-84 than females of the appropriate age.”[52] By the 1980s, the shortage of women available for marriage could already be felt.[53] Additionally, the ability to abort unwanted female fetuses in hope of having a boy enabled women to avoid the phenomenon that occurred with the “stopping rule.” This fact exhibited itself in the increasing male to female ratio with each birth order. In 1992, the male to female ratio for the birth of a first child was 117.9:100, a clear indication that parents were using prenatal technologies to ascertain the sex of their child—and in many cases to abort their girls.[54] But this ratio rose sharply with birth order; in 1992 the sex ratio at birth for fourth children was 228.8:100.[55] Thus, instead of waiting until they had a son to stop having children (as Korean parents had previously done), parents seem to have determined how many children they wanted and then began practicing abortion if they had not had a boy and were pregnant with their last desired child.

Yet from the mid-1990s to the present, dramatic changes occurred in South Korea. While the fertility rate remained very low (1.22 children were born per woman between 2000 and 2005, and 1.29 children were born per woman between 2005 and 2010),[56] the sex ratio completely reversed itself. By 2000, the sex ratio at birth had dropped to 109.6:100.[57] In 2007, the Republic of Korea announced that it had reached normal sex ratios at birth, and the United States Central Intelligence Agency puts the current male to female ratio at birth at 1.069:100.[58] South Korea is the only country in modern history to have a highly-abnormal birth ratio and then to reduce that number to fall within normal ratios.[59] Perhaps even more significant is that South Korea experienced this transformation in less than twenty years. Given the surprising but encouraging anomaly that Korea represents, the means by which it righted its gendercidal problems must be examined, in order to determine what factors should be present in other nations with high sex ratios that hope to fix their gendercidal problems. [Read the rest of the full paper here]

—————

[1] As quoted by Haejoang Cho, “Male Dominance and Mother Power: The Two Sides of Confucian Patriarchy in Korea,” in Confucianism and the Family, eds. Walter H. Slote and George A. De Vos (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1998), 192.

[4] For the purposes of this paper, the word “gender” is used interchangeably with “sex.” This is consistent with the definition utilized by the International Criminal Court, which holds “that the term ‘gender’ refers to the

[16] Mara Hvistendahl, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, (New York, New York: PublicAffairs, 2011), xxiii.

[17] Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, s.v. “Sex Ratio at Birth” in World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision, 2010, http://esa.un.org/wpp/unpp/panel_indicators.htm (accessed November 6, 2011).

[18] Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, s.v. “Population Sex Ratio” in World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision.

[19] Hudson and den Boer, 59.

[20] Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, s.v. “Sex Ratio at Birth” in World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision.

[24] “Gendercide: The Worldwide War on Baby Girls: Technology, Declining Fertility, and Ancient Prejudice are Combining to Unbalance Societies.”

[25]Hvistendahl, 97.

[26] Ibid., 98.

[27] Ibid., 97.

[28] Ibid., 120, 122.

[29] Hvistendahl, 122.

[30] It is important to note that today sex-selection can occur without feticide (through sex-selective abortion) or infanticide occurring. Reproductive technologies such as in-vitro fertilization and artificial insemination allow parents to determine the sex of their child in the embryonic stage, and even before conception. However, “outside of the United States those technologies are still nascent. Today in the developing world, abortion is most of the story. For now.” (Hvistendahl, xviii).

[31] Monica Sharma, “Twenty-first Century Pink or Blue: How Sex Selection Technology Facilitates Gendercide and What We Can Do About It,” Family Court Review 46, is. 1 (January 2008), http://onlinelibrary. wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1744-1617.2007.00192.x/full#fn59 (accessed November 6, 2011).

[41] Population Division of the United Nations Secretariat, s.v. “Republic of Korea” in Abortion Policies: A Global Review.

[42] Hvistendahl, 133.

[43] Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, s.v. “Total Fertility” in World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision.

[44] Hudson and den Boer, 55-56.

[45] Hvistendahl, 133.

[46] Ibid., 133.

[47] Ibid., 133.

[48] Ibid., 134.

[49] Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, s.v. “Total Fertility” in World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision.

[50] Hudson and den Boer, 55-56.

[51] “Gendercide: The Worldwide War on Baby Girls: Technology, Declining Fertility, and Ancient Prejudice are Combining to Unbalance Societies.”

[52] Monica Das Gupta and Li Shuzho, “Gender Bias in China, the Republic of Korea, and India 1920-90: Effects of War, Famine, and Fertility Decline,” Policy Research Working Paper 2140, The World Bank, Development Research Group, Poverty and Human Resources, June 1999, http://books.google.com/books?id=Hm3QJU8xsEgC&printsec=frontcover #v=onepage&q&f=false (accessed November 6, 2011).

[53] Ibid.

[54] Hudson and den Boer, 56.

[55] Ibid., 56.

[56] Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat, s.v. “Total Fertility” in World Population Prospects: The 2010 Revision.

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